What to do if my systemId has changed?

Commercial products (this does not apply to open source code) are conditioned upon acceptance of the licensing terms. Products are bound to the system where they have been activated though a unique system identifier named systemId, generated by ntop products. As products can be activated on virtual machines that can migrate across physical hardware, this might break licensing as the systemId might change and thus the license be no longer valid.

In these situations, you have two options:

if you have moved the license from a physical system to another (e.g. your old system break down and you have replaced it with new hardware), you can generate a new license as specified here.

instead, if you use VMs that are subject to change the hw configuration partially (leading to a change in the system identifier), you can add to the command line you used to start the ntop app the argument “–online-license-check”. In this case (and only in this case as without this command line option it does not happen) upon application start, the ntop licensing server is contacted to validate the license. If the license is recognised the application starts normally, if not recognised it means that we assume that you have a complete hardware change and thus that an additional license is required. Please note this option works also with proxies setting the http_proxy environment variable (export http_proxy=http://<IP>:<Port>).

Note that the online license check have some limitations with respect to file-based license:

Online licenses allow you to use your old license on a new machine if the new machine has changed (with respect to the old one) no more than one of the following things:

IP address

MAC address

CPU type

In fact the idea is to use the online license check for floating VMs but not for using the same application on multiple hosts simultaneously. If your old host has been discontinued (and thus the new hardware is totally different), you need to migrate you license permanently.